The American Society for Information Science and Technology has just named The Public Domain Book of the Year for 2009. I am really honoured.
I am off to Madrid for FICOD09 — a Spanish conference on the digital environment. It looks ambitious, and I couldn’t help being amused by the announcement below..
There are good reasons to worry about the Google Book Search Settlement, as I explained at length here. But of all of the reasons to oppose it, this surreal statement is my favourite.
European officials fear that if the Google project goes ahead in the US, a yawning transatlantic gap will open up in education and research.
“Oh my God! The Americans are about to create a private workaround of the enormous mess that we regulators have made of national copyright policy! They will fix the unholy legal screwups that leave most of the books of 20th century culture unavailable, yet still under copyright! They will gain access to their cultural heritage — giving them a huge competitive advantage in education. This MUST BE STOPPED!! No one can be allowed to fix this for any other country because then we would be left alone stewing in our own intellectual property stupidity! We must forbid their progress in order to protect our ignorance.” › read more
My newest FT column…
They call it the 20th century black hole and it lives up to its name. Huge quantities of matter are drawn by an overwhelming force into an inaccessible vortex from which not even light can escape. Except here, the overwhelming force is copyright law and the stuff relentlessly sucked into an inaccessible center is our collective culture. › read more
Atlas Mugged is the title of an FT article I wrote a little less than a year ago, at the depths of the crash. The question I asked was simple. Would this experience change economics and policy orthodoxies, as the Great Depression did in the 30’s? › read more
Disney characters respond..
A new article of mine just came out in the Communications of the ACM. An alert reader notified me that the article is behind a paywall — not available to those without subscriptions. Luckily, Communications is a fine humane publication and agreed to let me keep copyright in the article. Here it is.. My thanks to the editors of Communications and particularly to Moshe Vardi › read more
That’s the title of my new column in the Financial Times. It starts by talking about the Associated Press announcement that I had discussed earlier over on Techdirt. But here I wanted to make a different point. › read more
Only true copyright geeks will find this exciting, but the picture below is the frontispiece from James Thomson’s The Seasons, published by Alexander Donaldson in 1774, and the subject of one of the most famous copyright cases of all time, Donaldson v. Beckett. › read more
One of the delights of researching and writing The Public Domain was that I got to research so many fields, from jazz and soul and hip hop to synthetic biology, constitutional history and the story of the VCR. It was a dilettantes’ delight. I also got to interview fascinating people. Two such folk were the rappers who, together, make up The Legendary KO — Damien Randle and Micah Nickerson — the duo who wrote George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People as a protest about the handling of Hurricane Katrina by both the government and the media.
